On Tue, 10 Jul 2001, petro wrote:
On Mon, 9 Jul 2001, A. Melon wrote:
After all, given the state of the American Press, this would be P.R. Suicide for the Police.
It would, unless enough fear of these people can be spread among the general population. If you can make the people scared enough of X (whether X is anarchists or anybody else), the people won't protest when you start killing X. The US government, and various police forces, have used this principle extensively in the last decade or so; whenever they want license to kill X, they first demonize X in the press hoping to get lots of people scared of X.
The thing is, with the WTO protests, there isn't one X to demonize, and with anything from rifle-rounds to water cannons it isn't only the black bloc that's going to be hit. It's going to be the Pretty Little Hippy Chick who was Just Protesting Indonesian Sweat Shops. It's going to be the 40 something truck driver who was protesting the unsafe Mexican Trucks on the US highways. Sure, they'll get some of the Black Blockheads, but large crowds are chaos, and as soon as the shooting starts, things are going to get massively stochastic. -- http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense.